What’s It Like To Be a Hand Surgeon?

Real Fix

Credit: SWNS / Nick Pappas  A surgeon has revealed the unique things he's removed from people's hands - including sea urchin spines, fishhooks and bullets.  Nick Pappas, 43, has been a practising orthopaedic surgeon for 10 years and spends his time removing foreign objects, inserting metal plates and re-attaching fingers.  The hand specialist shared a list of recent things he's removed from hands.  First up on the list is screws - with Nick saying he often has to establish the brand of the screw to allow him to use the correct screwdriver to remove it.  He has also removed sea urchin spines after a patient fell onto one of the creatures - leaving spines embedded as far as the bone.

Transcript

00:00 sea urchin spines, to bullets, to doing your grandmother's arthritic thumb.

00:05 Hand surgery has got a lot of variety and that's why people really like it.

00:10 Hi, my name is Nick Pappas. I'm a hand surgeon. I've been doing it for over 10 years.

00:25 The most common thing is going to be like a ganglion cyst. Ganglion cyst is a common mass

00:30 that people get on the back of their hands. Every now and then someone would come in with a splinter.

00:35 I did train in West Philadelphia so there were actually a lot of bullets. Catfish spines,

00:40 fish hooks, different pieces of fish, you know, that sometimes when they're wrangling them in,

00:45 they get stabbed by it and they think something broke off and you know we end up taking that out

00:50 for Fourth of July or for like New Year's. People will try to hold a firework and it'll

00:55 accidentally go off in their hands. Wherever you're a hand surgeon, you learn a lot about

00:59 the local community. Definitely the hardest surgery was taking somebody's big toe and

01:09 transferring it to become a new thumb. That was pretty rigorous. If the transfer doesn't work,

01:17 then you end up with no thumb and no big toe because you can't just like put the big toe

01:21 back on and like glue it back there and it's ready to go. When I do a carpal tunnel release

01:25 or trigger finger release, which are small, you know, 10-minute surgeries, yeah that one's the

01:30 most stressful. I always say doing one of those, you shave about a year off your life, I think,

01:34 because of the worry. People of Scandinavian descent, they get this real thick tissue built

01:46 up in their palms and their hands slowly contract down. They will just live like this. I now have

01:52 a medicine that I can just inject into this tissue and within 24 hours I can straighten

01:59 the finger out back to pretty much normal cascade, the normal straightness of the finger.

02:03 And that's the first time I've had patients like so happy they're actually in tears in the office.

02:09 They like can't believe it. A lot of times I'll do babies who have extra fingers. The parents

02:14 are so thankful that those are those are great things. There's not a lot of hand surgery and

02:24 hand surgeons on social media, so I think that some of the people don't even know these things

02:29 exist. People do like the visually appealing stuff. Some people just like little life hacks,

02:34 you know, like I've posted things about an ingrown nail. Every video I post I want to try to have

02:41 something that captures your attention, something that educates you,

02:44 and then maybe something that's funny. So you kind of are really educating the world.

02:49 [Music]

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